CLOCKS

A first encounter in Into Air is a photographic work. Larger than human height the portrait presents a melting block of frozen pigments. Layered in luscious tones, the ephemeral object is part of a series called ‘Clocks’, several of which anchor the show in the form of lightboxes and photographs. Captured as they perish, each block is an architecture of acrylics, inks, watercolours and dyes, built over a month at sub zero temperatures by Dawn Ng in her studio. Like actual clocks, the works give momentary physicality to passing time. Embedded within uniquely designed wooden structures by the artist in collaboration with EBBA architects to echo the language of church pews and pulpits. Time here is revered in solitary sanctuaries of colour, texture and form.

TIME LOST FALLING IN LOVE

As each monolithic fragment evolves, the colours bleed into a mélange of tinctures. Filmed as they fracture, the millimetric disintegration is captured in Dawn’s time lapse films, entitled ‘Time Lost Falling In Love.’ The work holds time between one’s self and a moving image through its meditative erosion of colour, mirroring the collapse of avalanches and waterfalls in slow motion. In the context of a global pandemic, the work is deeply empathetic: how more than ever we became aware of time, connection, loss, loneliness; how it’s all a matter of scale and personal perspective; how a blip in time may be an eternity for one and an instant for another; how in the context of the universe, we’re but a speckle in its grandiosity.

ASH

From each block of frozen pigment’s remaining swirl of tones a corresponding set of works are born: Dawn’s ‘Ash’ paintings. The melted pigments receive a form of resurrection through their incarnation as painterly formulae. Each painting is created by the manoeuvred staining, dredging and evaporation of melted pigment through large sheets of canvas-like paper: crisp yet loose, each abstract surface is both intuitive and delicate. The artist’s process of prolonged steeping, gives rise to the soft blooming of colours and frays the paper fibres, allowing parts of its surface to be peeled by hand to reveal the patina of time. Deeply textural, they evoke the beauty of imperfection, how even the smoothest of skins has crevices or the purest of light has shadow. Akin to giant pages of a book written with brushes in a language all can read, they are each part of a story, the culmination of a journey. Presented upright in a totemic manner as well as laying on the ground, the ‘Ash’ works physically invite both upwards wonder and a downwards gaze, a circular motion that welcomes glances to where you are more widely: a contemporary instant in the making, a historical site in the harbouring.